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“El Faraòn” is 65 years old. This nickname of his comes from the  impassiveness of the traits and that being almost timeless of his, as
mummified already in the years of youth.
When it's his turn, even if you don't
understand nothing, he smiles to you, and your are suddenly aware
why 14.000 spectators of the Real Maestranza of Seville tribute to
the “Pharaon “ Curro Romero, on stage over 45 years, thousands
of bulls behind him, a ten butts with the horns in his skin, the frenetic
homage deserved to the great.
“El Yankee” was 65 years
old when, last year, an ictus carried him off. His real name was John
Fulton and was born at Philadelphia from an Italian father and a Hungarian
mother. As a boy, he saw at the movie 'Blood and sand ': “It
changed my life”. He got to Spain after the military service,
a single ticket and 300 dollars. After ten years of novice bullfights,
he become officially torero at Seville and than at Madrid, the only
American boasting such title.
“The funerals were celebrated
at the Maestranza”, tells me Francisco “Curro” Camacho,
who was a good torero in the seventies and who was a kind of adoptive
child n for Fulton. “We make him do his last entry by the Prince
Gate, as it was up to his rank. A symbolic ceremony, everybody was
there to bid him farewell. Few days before dying we hold a fiesta
in the country  with
wives and friends, laughter, drinks and barbecue“. Camacho manages
by now the art gallery of Fulton in Plaza de la Alianza, in the Santa
Cruz quarter. “John was an artist, not only in the bullring.
He painted, sculpted, wrote. He was the stand-in of Peter O'Toole
in 'Lawrence of Arabia', a flamenco dancer, a photographer. When I
stopped fighting bulls, it was between today and tomorrow, I was physical
integral but I felt too worry, I did not know what to do. John helped
me: “The torero is an artist, even if he does no fight bulls
anymore“.
I opened a club, than a restaurant,
I wrote an autobiographic book “.
“El Niño del Sol Naciente”
(The Boy of the Rising Sun) is not yet 25 years old. Since four years
his arm and his left leg are paralysed. It's a miracle the way he
recovered- tells Camacho - but surely the bullfight is only a memory
for him“. His real name is Atsubiro Shimoyama, and when John
Fulton saw him  fighting
as novice bullfighter, he sensed he has founded a talent and another
one's self, young and Asiatic, forty years old younger.
Besides the prowess, it was that story,
parallel to his to beat him: an American boy and a Japanese one who,
at a distance of years and separated by an ocean, yearned for bulls
and bullfights, the feel themselves Spanish and dream the bullring.
The boy was real good, and contracts
arrived soon, provided that he would fight at once. In the summer
1995, at the last of a series of six novice bullfights, the bull broke
his mandible. Besides the mandible the bull shot him at the neck,
and nobody realized that his carotid was obstructed and that blood
did not get anymore to the brain. Americans, Japanese... what do they
deal with bullfight only they knows .
In “Death in the afternoon“
that is already a classic about this themes,  Hemingway
beard that to love bullfights one must be “interested in death“.
Whatever, something typical Spanish can be found in extra-national
individuals.
The Scottish Eamonn O'Neill has just
published for the Mainstream Publishing Matadors “A Journey
into the Heart of Modern Bullfighting”, a book that is a little
an autobiography, a little a chronicle, a little the tale of an unforgettable
summer spent by the author trying to understand something about that
was  'indefinable
but irresistible”.
French was Michael Leiris whose “Mirror
of the tauromachy” (Bollati Boringhieri) is published for the
first time in Italian, thought and wrote more than 60 years ago, a
work of a surrealist sui generis and of an heterodox ethnologist.
French was Montherlant, who stayed
and fought bulls as an amateur, author of “Les bestiaires”
and of a volume of draws about this theme, inventor for Belmonte,
the greatest torero ever been, friend of his, of the phrase
“to bullfight with the guts “, to mean how much man and
animal seemed to him bound in the same embrace.
The past “Feria de Abril”
showed not only the triumph of Curro Romero, but also the resurrection
of Juan Antonio Ruiz, called “Espartaco”, a Sevillian
defined by the “Revista de estudios taurinos”, “the
more technical torero and the one with much sense
of rhythm “ of the ten past years but stopped by a broken knee.
At the end, while the public cheered
to him and waved their white handkerchiefs, he staid at the centre
of the bullring kissing earth and slipping it through his fingers.
When they gave him the bull's ears
and he lapped his vuelta he cried as a child.
And finally he received the confirmation
of Rivera Ordonez, a family in Spain that is like the Kennedy dynasty
in the United States. Twenty-four years old, Francisco is the great
grandson of Cayetano, the grandson of Antonio, who was the great rival,
besides being the brother in law of Dominguin in the fifties.
 Says
Felipe B. Pedreza, teacher of Spanish literature at the University
of Castile and author of “Iniciacion a la fiesta de los toros”
(biblioteca Edef) that the bullfight is “a myth and a spectacle
keeping all the violence of life “.
The day of the triumph of Pepin Liria,
a banderillero ended up to the hospital, seriously gored and kicked
by the bull.
Another too at Espartaco even with
more light wounds. Surely it's a business. One hundred millions tickets
have been sold past years for more than 14 billions
lire, 250.000 have been the persons attached around.
il-rights supporters bear that it
is pure barbarism, fans replies that it is not a sport, it is not
an exhibition it's something more, belonging to life, to the clash
between two opposite realities, the brute force on a side and intelligence
on the other. They forget that, before getting to the ring, bulls
are animals for slaughter, already sold to be eaten. The others reply
that interests and corruption often turn the bullfight into a butchery
annulling the sacredness they preach.
It's splendid the springtime at Seville,
behind the royal gardens of the Alcazar, before the quarter of Santa
Cruz fills with music and the Giralda of the cathedral strikes the
9 o'clock of the evening. Conversation enlivens.
One gives his opinion about Dominguin:
“If, as a conjecture, the bull does not get wrong and neither
me, Luis Miguel, then what you see in it? Another replies quoting
Manolo Bienvenida: “When the torero gets wrong, the bull gets
advantage of it. But it happens too that it is the bull to get wrong,
you do not expect it, and so you end up gored“.
A third one refers to the authority
of Curro Romero: “If the bull forewarns you, and you go on,
it ends bad for you. But if you work well with it, you entrust it
and it betrays you, that's not ok.”.
Don Quixote still lives here.
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